X-GEN Version 5.1: Recent Changes

This document summarizes the differences between X-GEN Version 5.1,
promulgated during summer 2004, and earlier versions.

From the user's point of view an important distinction between X-GEN 5.1
and earlier versions is that most of the individual applications can
be run with no or nearly no run-time parameters. In earlier versions it
was necessary to set a large number of run-time variables in order to
get the programs to do what the user wanted. In version 5.1 the options still
exist, but the user can in general count on the defaults to work correctly.
This is possible because the software examines the type of data being
processed and the stage of the processing effort before it decides
how to run. Thus if no run-time parameters override the settings that
would generally be appropriate for a run of a particular application,
then these "smart defaults" will be activated.

Certain activities that previously required invocation of several
specific applications have been merged together. Specifically,
the functionality represented by the border application,
which determined the active area of the detector, has now been merged
into the spots application. Thus it is unnecessary to invoke
border separately. Furthermore, the functionalities represented
by scalek, reject, stats, spaceg, and
makemu have been merged into one application, scalem.
Once the user has created the merged data file (the "multiref")
either by running reduce on a single data run worth of data or
by running mrmerge to combine data from several runs, he or she
can complete the post-processing of the integrated data simply by typing
scalem.

The parameter refinement functionality previously available only
in the Curses-based application refine, is now available in two
additional forms: a line-oriented interface, refine1, and a hands-off,
automated form, refall. See the specific documentation on
these two applications for details.